The simulation of backlight systems is commonly performed by conventional ray tracing. In a conventional ray trace simulation through a variety of different components, components may be specified in a non-standard manner, which may require the simulation software to handle various components differently from a computational standpoint, thus introducing complexity into the simulation methodology. In addition, different users may decide to use different parameters to specify a particular component, leading to potential user-to-user variations in simulated performance. Furthermore, the ray trace calculations themselves may be prohibitively lengthy.